June 2012

27 June 2012

We say that kanban is a visual control, but we also eschew external control (rules) being placed on us by others. So what does control really mean? We when we look at it, we have a lot of depth here.

(1) Like a dial – a controller

We can use our kanban as a controller for our work. We can adjust our WIP limits, the people doing the work, the throughput of various work-item-types, the granularity at which we track our work. We have a number of dials we can tweak to control our work.

(2) Controlling action through constraints

The kanban itself places constraints on our work. It enforces policies we have set. The WIP limits, the value stream, what is allowed and when, and so forth are controlled using the board.

(3) Controlled experiments

When we hypothesize something can be done to alleviate a bottleneck or some other item inhibiting flow, we can run controlled experiments using sour board as the laboratory. We can make small changes and measure their impacts directly.

(4) Communications Control

The board, in real-time, is a control center – communicating status, activity, bottlenecks, completion rates, issues, staff availability, and more. It is the switchboard of your team.

It’s important for us to grasp that “control” means many things. This helps us envision more creative and robust controls.

12 June 2012

Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp”, we are now nearing Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)

This year, Kaizen Camp is the July 24-25. Again we are at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. We also have award-winning food trucks (with vegetarian options) catering the event. So, no boring food! The event is nearly half full already, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.

The diversity of ideas and voices are unparalleled – which is exactly what we were searching for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People share success stories as well as challenges. Different disciplines work together to create new ideas. Continuous Improvement is explored.

Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. This year looks even better.

02 June 2012

This song was recorded in 1985, it was likely the 20th version of the song. It’s not our best song, but it is my favorite. Corey Smith, David Fisher, and myself in Corey’s living room. We all played just about everything on it. Yes, those are my vocals, with Dave doing rap and backup.

In those days, I could walk into a room of my friends and start making crazy strings of noises. Corey, I want you to take the guitar and go ba ba tssst tssst tssst babababa wham. And Corey would do it, except a lot better and with an actual guitar. Dave, I want you to pound on those things over there like this tap tap bam taptaptap bamBAM. And he’d do it.

And soon we’d have a song, or something like a song. Doing overdubs on it until we’d either reached perfection or total audio breakdown.

You have no idea how much I want to go back to that time, if only for a few hours.

Now when I listen to this song, I am struck by how I am the only one left alive. I’m not quite old enough to say this, I think.

Corey left us in 1990 in a car accident. Sudden, extreme, painful – like a shotgun blast. I was still in Michigan and flew back to Nebraska for his funeral. At that time, Dave was getting his law degree from the University of Nebraska.

Corey’s funeral was more than likely the most painful day of my life.

While I was there, I had a conversation with Dave’s then girlfriend Melissa. She was taking me to task for writing zines that described Dave’s and my misadventures in Colorado. Most of these stories involved me hauling Dave’s overly drunk body out of one situation or another.

She yelled at me across a table at an Italian restaurant: “I would kill you if you wrote things like that about me, but you know what Dave says?”

“I’m just glad I make good copy.” Dave said, taking a sip of beer.

But those stories were prescient. Corey died suddenly, unexpectedly, shockingly. Dave died very slowly, painfully, and perhaps worst of all, boringly. The initially funny stories of Dave’s antics led ultimately to annoyance. Dave stopped making good copy.

In 1985 in Denver, on the Denver University campus, Simon Bone yelled at Dave, “Goddammit, you’re an alcoholic at 20 years old!” (Back then, the drinking age in Colorado was 18 for ‘3.2 beer’.)

Dave’s heroes were Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski. In Denver, we’d stay up late talking about literature, music, and thought. Dave saw the prolific writing of 2 of his heros (Jack and Bukowski), and the stories generated by the third (Neal). Those guys drank heavily, why couldn’t Dave?

Simon was right, of course. Dave was already an alcoholic. While in Denver, I became more and more annoyed with Dave’s drinking. After Denver, each time I saw him, we connected less and less. His sharp mind would latch on to manic tangents and he would rant just on the border of nonsense.

Dave was dying slowly.

One day, in what I believe was 2003, Dave called me at 5 in the morning. This was not unusual and we had a policy not to answer the phone at that time. Something told me I should answer the phone. So I did.

Dave was in the process of drinking himself to death, with the strategic aid of sleeping pills, in a Presidential Suite of a hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. I managed to figure out where he was and get police and paramedics to him. He died in his hotel room, then again in the ambulance, then again in the ER.

His wife was the strange mix of sad, infuriated, and unsurprised that I am today.

Of course, Dave did not die in 2003. He managed to come back even after three charges at the pearly gates.

I hoped that this would be the ‘rock bottom’ that Dave needed to get better.

So, Dave and his wife really liked status-type things. So they checked Dave into a rehab clinic loaded with music and film stars. Net effect: they spent some money and met some stars.

Years pass and Dave ends up with an ultimatum from a judge in Nebraska, where Dave has moved to do … nothing at all but drink. “Get sober or get time,” the judge says. So Dave went to a rehab clinic in Colorado.

By this time, I had come to the conclusion that I was an enabler for Dave and had stopped taking his calls altogether. In a way, failing to come back from the three deaths and make something of himself offended me. It made me resent that Corey had left this earth long before his time and now Dave was just pissing away his talents and intellect.

But, one day, the phone rings and something tells me to pick it up.

Dave is at a Buddhist rehab clinic in Colorado. And, holy crap, the guy on the phone is my old friend Dave.

He’s lucid, creative, smart, optimistic.

And I got very excited.

It was like someone I cared about had died … and come back. ... because it was that exactly. You just don't get gifts like this.

Over the next few weeks, Dave and I had great conversations. We talked almost every day. The monks had asked Dave to stay on and work at the facility. This was too good to be true. I made plans to go to Colorado and visit him.

“I just have to go back to Grand Island to clear up some stuff with the family,” Dave said.

“No!” I said, “Don’t under any circumstances go back to Nebraska.” I knew if he did, he’d slide right back to the bottle.

And that’s what happened. My next calls from Dave were rambling incoherence and him telling me he was sober. After several calls of me asking, suggesting, pleading, or cajoling him to go back to the facility, I Finally told him, “The only call I’ll take from you is when you’re back in Colorado.”

And I never spoke to him again. We "talked" on the phone a few times, but it was always me listening and nothing really being said.

During Dave’s last decade, he managed to get himself in all sorts of trouble that would have made good copy. Dave had more talent than necessary to quit drinking, tell those stories, and tell them with a purpose.

As it is, Dave, who ironically inherited a bunch of money that did not let him “have a real life” but did enable him to drink his life away, died a few weeks ago in a lonely hospital room in Grand Island, Nebraska. What he specifically died of is unknown to me and it doesn’t really matter. It was a long slow downhill slide.

Like both Jack and Neal, Dave died in his 40s.

Today, part of me feels guilty for not helping Dave more. Part of me wonders if it wouldn’t have been better for everyone if I didn’t answer the phone in 2003. Part of me will feel forever pissed off that Dave didn’t write his own Dharma Bums or Subterraneans. Dave leaves us a legacy of unrealized potential.

01 June 2012

The Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LSSC) has evolved to the Lean Systems Society (LSS). I was never a member of LSSC, but I am a founding fellow of LSS. Why?

LSSC was a very necessary institution to begin talking about Lean in software development. With LSSC, we had several awesome conferences that rapidly increased the level of thought, range of adoption, and inclusion of new groups.

However, LSSC’s mission was very open-ended. Talks with LSSC ranged from setting up free communities to instituting scrum.org style certification for Capital K Kanban. I want to be clear here that I really love the LSSC people – it’s just that my voice was better used from the outside of the organization, always discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond Software.

LSS is an entirely different animal. It is only focused on discussing new ideas and ways to expand the community beyond software. So … it seems to fit me better!

Along with this transition comes two things that I want to talk about:

Thing 1: LSSC 2012

This year’s conference felt different. I think we did a few things that gave this year’s LSSC a bit of slack.

Calmer Content

This is the part where I get to talk about how wrong I was. So, I’m all big into setting up unconferences and putting the people in charge of the content. This year, at LSSC we had a few track chairs (mercifully few!) who were responsible for populating the content in their tracks. The speakers this year were awesome, the quality of the presentations was stellar, and the smaller number of tracks meant that people could focus.

I was initially unhappy with the decision to go this way – but in the end it made for a fantastic conference.

Start Loud

This year we started with a one-day unconference, a community meeting, a special event (Lean Action Kitchen), and a reception. This year just started fun and thoughtful. We built up a great momentum on the first day.

In addition, each day started with a Lean Coffee that went from last year’s one table to three to five tables a day.

Centralized Vendors in a Fun Location

Rather than having the vendors off in some removed part of the building, this year they were right at the center of everything. The vendors helped this by becoming “snack central” as well – it seemed like everyone had food. The space was also light and airy – which is something I noticed about the entire conference – the whole thing seemed less cramped and dark.

Thing 2: The LSS Mission Statement

The Lean Systems Society believes that excellence in managing complexity requires accepting that complexity and uncertainty are natural to social systems and knowledge work. Effective systems must produce both better economic and sociological outcomes. Their development requires a holistic approach that incorporates the human condition. The Society is committed to exploring valuable ideas from all disciplines, and fostering a community that derives solutions from a common set of values and principles, while embracing specific context and avoiding dogma.

There’s nothing I can’t get behind here. This is an outward facing, humanistic, respectful approach to business, learning, and people.

This year I was lucky enough to win a Brickell Key award, which is given every year to two people in recognition of their work in this community. This meant a lot to me, because my focus has been often beyond software and my style of presentation is sometimes, shall we say, nonchalant.

This award was especially rewarding for me, given that this year I really feel like the community has really come into its own. This has been an exciting movement to be a part of and I look forward to what comes next.